Calendar csv file

I bought my Droid to replace an old TI organizer plus a cell phone. The organizer will export calendar, contacts, etc. to csv files, which look perfectly sensible opened in Notepad (Win XP). In particular, the appointments file has a first row with item titles: date, start time, duration, end time, description, adv_notice, alarm_set, each in double quotes. Each subsequent row has those items in that order, separated by commas (and double quotes around the description), with either a zero or nothing as a placeholder where an item has no entry.

When in my gmail account I try to import the calendar, prior to synchronizing with the Droid, I get a notice "Failed to import events. Unable to process your iCalthat/CSV file." I am guessing that the items are not in the right order, but cannot find anywhere that tells me the precise required format for the csv file. (I have managed to discover how to transfer contacts, although it involves a fair bit of manual editing).

I really don't want to involve gmail anyway. I would like to load a file into the SD card via the USB cable, and then load that into Calendar. That works for contacts. Is is not possible for calendar information?

I need to transfer this information to my Droid; if I cannot, the Droid is of no use to me and will go back. Can someone help, please.

I bought my Droid to replace an old TI organizer plus a cell phone. The organizer will export calendar, contacts, etc. to csv files, which look perfectly sensible opened in Notepad (Win XP). In particular, the appointments file has a first row with item titles: date, start time, duration, end time, description, adv_notice, alarm_set, each in double quotes. Each subsequent row has those items in that order, separated by commas (and double quotes around the description), with either a zero or nothing as a placeholder where an item has no entry.

When in my gmail account I try to import the calendar, prior to synchronizing with the Droid, I get a notice "Failed to import events. Unable to process your iCalthat/CSV file." I am guessing that the items are not in the right order, but cannot find anywhere that tells me the precise required format for the csv file. (I have managed to discover how to transfer contacts, although it involves a fair bit of manual editing).

I really don't want to involve gmail anyway. I would like to load a file into the SD card via the USB cable, and then load that into Calendar. That works for contacts. Is is not possible for calendar information?

I need to transfer this information to my Droid; if I cannot, the Droid is of no use to me and will go back. Can someone help, please.

Ken Gundry

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If you have it in Outlook, or can link it easily to Outlook, you can use a program called CompanionLink to sync both your contacts and calendar with GMail, which will then sync down to the phone.
It has a free 14 day trial and out of all the ones I've tested, that works the best for syncing.

Do you intend to sync via USB? Personally, I find wireless sync/backup very useful.

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Yeah, the gmail sync is a godsend. Even if you don't utilize it to its fullest potential, just the fact that your phone can auto-sync to it will save a lot of headaches.
If you have to do a hard reset, BAM! All your contacts and calendar events are back!
That's why I never messed around much with my old smart phones, it was too much of a PITA to sync the data, and after the initial setup, you have to be very careful to adjust your sync settings have a hard reset or you lose all the data!

Thank you all, but I have spent most of the afternoon on this, without success. I gave in on the gmail issue, since nothing else seemed to offer hope.

I eventually worked out the intricacies of the csv format, and successfully rearranged the file from my organizer to form a csv file that gmail would accept. Within gmail the calendar items are now correctly displayed on my XP computer. However, the Droid will not sync with them. It is apparently connecting to the gmail, since I can send and receive test emails (I don't intend to use it for that purpose, so this was purely for testing), and when I ask it to synchronize it seems to go through the motions (little circle rotating etc.) In fact, at some stage during my experiments, the Droid seems to have downloaded the US public holidays, since they were not there this morning and are now, and during the morning I made a very short experimental csv file containing four dummy items and that synchronized quite happily.

I think I have spent about 12 hours so far, with very little satisfaction. Since my wife is also totally frustrated (and upset at my upsetness), we are close to returning the infernal machines ... but I hate to give up!

Well, for the sake of others, I should say how I have solved the problem. Once you have successfully exported your calendar entries to gmail, and then synchronized them with the Droid, there is one more hurdle. If you load calendar, select the menu and choose more, there are two options: "my calendars" and "settings". Selecting "my calendars" leads to two more options, "US holidays" and "name@gmail.com" (your gmail address), and apparently by default the latter is not enabled, so although the calendar entries you have struggled to get into the Droid are indeed there, they are not displayed! Checking "name@gmail.com" revealed all the missing calendar items.

Now if the downloadable instruction manual had had an index, and if that had included all the menu options and their effect ....! Does anyone know whether a proper instruction book exists? The only thing I could find, entitled Droid User Guide (a pdf file designed to be difficult to print) is utterly useless.